5 Ways you can improve your businesses processes using your website.

In this article, you’ll learn five simple ways you can use your website to add business processes to help systemise areas of your business saving you time, giving your staff and customers a better experience.

It amazes me how many big businesses have poor outdated systems, and small businesses have no processes whatsoever.

• They still use word docs for contracts
• Manually entering data from emails
• Manually chasing payments

Most business owners just see their website as a must-have thing or at best a marketing and sales tool. But with the tools available to use today and a little creative thinking, your site can put internal processes into your business, saving hours of yours and your team’s time, give your customer an excellent experience and help you to get paid quicker.

Which business owner wouldn’t like that.

Below are a few ways you can use your website to help support, systemise and grow your business.

Automating your marketing and sales.

Use case 1. Someone fills out an enquiry form

1. The details the user submits through the web form is automatically saved into your CRM.
2. The web form submission fires an automation that places the potential new customer into a Deal phase of your sales pipeline.
3. An automated email goes out to the user to say that you have received their enquiry and you will get back to them as soon as possible.
4. An email or task is assigned to the sales team to follow up with the enquiry.

If you wanted to take this to a more advanced level, you could even take the user on different paths based on what they submitted through the web form.

Use case 2 – Remarketing to your clients based on their actions.

Let’s say a previous lead or subscriber hits a particular page on your website and you want to find out if they were interested or give them more information.

You can automatically follow up with that lead to see if they have any questions about the service.

This could be done with an email or notification to the sales team to give them a call

 

Straightforward but effective stuff.

In these examples, we are using ActiveCampaign and Gravity Forms.

Onboarding new clients

Let’s say you need a new client to sign a contract before they begin work with you.

Once that document was signed by the client that triggered off an onboarding sequence that told the project manager to book the work in and automatically set up a list of standard deliverables for that project.

Here’s how.

1. Hidden page on your site with a web form – This asks you for the vital project details

Project name

Clients Name

Project time

Project costs

2. Once the form is submitted the contract is prefilled with this data and automatically sent to the client asking them to sign the contract.

3. Once the contract is signed, you can push the user’s details back into your CRM and move them to your client’s list and automatically triggering your onboarding sequence.

Wowing your customers

Let’s say you run an online training programme.

A great way to wow your users and get them to stick around would be to drip feed the content to them in an organised and timely manner.

You can also set triggers so that when a user completes a lesson or a course module, they are greeted with a chat box congratulating them on their success as well as an email telling them they’ve now unlocked bonus material or a badge.

You could also use the software to encourage learners that have started on their learning journey but stalled, and you wanted to give them.

Giving them a great learning experience and making them more engaged and less likely to leave.

In this example – This is acheived using Learndash, Intercom Live chat and ActiveCampaign

Getting paid faster

Do you work with your clients on an ongoing basis?

Just sending them an invoice and waiting for them to pay can to can be a frustrating experience and have a negative impact on your cash flow, chasing them for money can affect or sometimes damage the relationship.

If you had a monthly subscription payment service running through your website, this could be used to get the client to signup with their bank or card details.

This way you would automatically charge the client on a monthly basis with no headaches or time wastage chasing the funds. Giving you a happier accounts team and a more satisfied client.

The system can also notify them, and you of cancellations or expired cards enabling you to reach out and get the payments solved or restricting the service.

If you want to take this even further, you can link the payment processor to your Accounting software, so the invoices are automatically created and reconciled once made.

For this example, we currently use Woocommerce, Woocommerce subscriptions and Stripe for payments

Supplying artwork

This one may be more relevant to creative business but still, a great way to get feedback on a new design or a new set of plans or photos.

This is made a lot easier using a neat little plugin called Project Huddle.

Just upload your artwork to the back end of the website and share the link. The client can then leave comments on the design, helping you to identify which area they mean quickly and easily.

This can then be shared with the design team for the second round of revisions.

The whole process makes collating feedback quicker and easier and gives your clients a much better experience and makes you look more professional.

To wrap up

As you can see with a bit of thinking and the right tools you can dramatically reduce the time spent managing projects, dealing with new inquiries and getting paid faster.

Automation is a beautiful thing and can massively reduce time, costs and build processes into the business that would impress any investor or potential buyer.

These methods can be applied to almost any business no matter what the market and if there are processes in your business that you would like to solve it’s entirely possible with the technology available to us today.

If you’d like us to detail any of the processes above in more detail – please feel free to drop us an email [email protected], and we’d be happy to help.